Details Emerge About Judith Regan Firing

Posted on December 18, 2006

More details have emerged about the summary dismissal of Judith Regan Friday night. Media reports say that Regan essentially cussed out a HarperCollins attorney, making anti-Semitic remark. The CEO of HarperCollins, Jane Friedman, who is Jewish, was not amused and called Rupert Murdoch, who fired her on the spot. But her firing has apparently been coming on for a while, according to The New York Times.

No one woke up Friday morning and discovered that Ms. Regan had bad, if lucrative, taste. But when her O. J. Simpson deal went south, she refused to go away quietly even though Mr. Murdoch had already taken a bullet, then continued to complain that she was being undermined long after the story had quieted down. The News Corporation had profited handsomely from Ms. Regan's tendency to shoot from the hip, but when she started firing inside the corral, well then, that was another matter.
If she did it, here's how: Ms. Regan first responded to public opprobrium over the Simpson project with an unhinged eight-page defense of her interview. And then, after the plug was pulled on Nov. 21, she failed to accept the decision. (When Mr. Murdoch says something is dead, put away the paddles and pull up the hearse.) Instead she railed against HarperCollins, the News Corporation book division that owns her ReganBooks imprint, while taping her Sirius Satellite Radio show, according to Ron Hogan, an editor at GalleyCat, which is a book-oriented blog. And finally, she made offensive remarks in a phone call to one of the company's lawyers on Friday, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.
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Ms. Regan always lived her public life as if it were one big MySpace page, which she filled with outrageous personal and professional behavior and intemperate words. Part of it seemed like shtick, but she seemed to cross a line bordering on mania after her motives in interviewing Mr. Simpson were questioned. First, she issued a statement that compared her own alleged victimization as a battered woman with that of the murdered Nicole Brown Simpson. "The men who lied and cheated and beat me - they were all there in the room. And the people who denied it, they were there, too." (It sounded a little crowded in there.)

Judith Regan and Jane Friedman have a rocky history, which is one reason why Judith ended up on the West Coast. But in the end, she went up against Jane Friedman and lost. Big Time.